These were a couple of questions that went through my mind the other night as I was doing a poor job at falling asleep. I think I ended up generating more questions than opinions.

There is money to be made off the sick. Doctors are highly paid, and hospitals have boards and stake holders that receive compensation in non-profit and for-profit organizations. When the actions of a non-profit hospital become about maximization of surplus, (non-profit lingo for ‘profit’,) and inflated reimbursement to executives rather than providing health care for the community, I think they put their 501(c)(3) status in jeopardy. The government collects taxes, and if your organization’s purpose is to provide charitable services, they can waive those taxes.

The previous paragraph aside, and assuming everyone agrees that all people deserve access to medical care, how do you build a system that allows equal access to that care regardless of a persons station in life? Some may measure equality by the cost of the service. I think we should measure equality by the access to the service. On the surface, it doesn’t seem fair that someone with great wealth should pay more for health care than someone with little wealth. I can see how someone would look at that and say, “That’s clearly not fair,” and I suppose they would be right. It is not equitable in value, but it is honorable. I think it is a morality failure for those with more to not help those with less. It is a morality failure to abuse health care for personal gain rather than using it to care for humanity.

We need more incorrupt people managing health care rather than more legislation attempting to regulate moral behavior. Maybe the former is just a pipe dream?

So, you have secured a line item in the church budget for “Website Improvements,” now where do you begin?

I had the opportunity to work alongside Carol in raising up Lee’s Summit’s current website on the TYPO3 / WEC platform a couple years ago. The project took 9 months and cost just over $14,000. Aspects of the strategy mentioned in the article were adopted from Sprint, which as you can imagine is an enormous company that manages massive technical projects.

In 2006 the website project won an “Award of Excellence” at Church of the Resurretion. Although I’m horrible at accepting compliments for my work, it was pleasurable for some of my work to be recognized.

This morning driving in to work the radio announced, “Last night Barak Obama made history and became the first black person to be elected US president.” I immediately got teary eyed, and chills swept over me. :p Today is a new and unique day. Regardless of Obama’s performance over the next four years, I am very proud of my country today. I never thought this day would come so early in my lifetime.

I have a good exucse for my busyness though. My wife and I began attempting pregnancy, rather than avoiding it, back in July of 2008. We were successful right out of the gate! Pania is 16 weeks along. Along with that news, I’m announcing babyslezak.com, where we will keep extended family and friends up to date.

For your enjoyment, I’ve been tweeting only the pointless and mundane events as they happen. :-/ Hopefully I’ll have more interesting stuff as I get back into the swing of this. [Update] But at least it’s not as boring as what JKilgore is doing on 12 seconds. C’mon man, your world can’t revolve around Tony Dye.

Tonight we toured Johnson Ferry Baptist Church. Their network was highly impressive, with a lot of enterprise class hardware in it. It seemed way over engineered, but their network admin said they were overloading the previous gear.

If you a reader here, watch my twitter and blog for more updates of the conference throughout this week and next.

The hours of research and reading were actually prompted by Scoble’s post, Economic Idiocy, in which he states:

In the past 18 hours I’ve read literally thousands of posts and have done almost nothing but hang out on FriendFeed. I’ve seen a LOT of idiocy.

I have been interested in the recent ecomomic and legislative turmoil for a while but had not researched it. Some of my co-workers started engaging me in conversation, and all I had was unknowledgable opinion on it. Upon reading Scoble’s post, I just got tired of myself and started researching reliable resources. I re-learned a lot on the legislative process itself, having first learned this back in high school when I could have cared less.

I am not going to post all my thoughts about the emergency economic stabalization act of 2008, but only to say after hours of reading, thought, and discussion amoungst friends, I find myself in favor of it … for now. I think the people that cry for justice against these leding institutions should read Devistion A, sections 111 and 302 of the bill. If you are not satisfied there, read bill H.R.7125, initially named Let Wall Street Pay for Wall Street’s Illiquid Assets Act of 2008. Then contact your state house representatvive and senator and tell them they need to support this bill.

She ended up going with a Mac, of course, and loves it. The store where she bought it offers a 1 hr per week tutoring service for $99 per year, and she’s thinking about doing that to get up to speed with the change from Windows to OS X.

Microsoft is losing.

<sigh> I instantly knew this was wrong in many ways, but after actually putting some thought behind it, here is why:

There is NO Audience for this Sign
C’mon. Seriously, who walks around with the thought, “I’d actually like to be <insert denomination here>. I wonder how I can do that?” No one does. This sign better targets squirrels, because squirrels like to sit on signs. Squirrels can’t even read.

The End is Near
More likely, this sign is a visible cry for help. Please be a part of our church, or we’ll die! Help!

You Will Talk to Us
Rather than provide a site urn, which someone could expose themselves too before attempting anything, they provided a number. That means even if I was interested, I’m gonna have to talk to someone and say, “Yeah I saw this sign with this number … so I called it.” Hmm.

That’s Some High Quality
A hand written sign plopped in the front yard? Oh no - you didn’t?! Printing out banners on 8×10 sheets of paper, splicing them together, and and covering the whole thing with clear tape - would be a step up from this. Think about that. How serious is this church about welcoming someone, if they either A. will not pay for a printed sign, B. don’t have the motivation to go through that trouble, or C. do not have the money. If C - then close the doors.

Please, please, if you are someone in a church that has this or other similar sign - take it down! Please don’t advertise like this. Squirrels appreciate it, but you are making rational people laugh, cry, or both.

If you’ve ever thought that you don’t have time or strength to be part of a cause like this, you can be a part of this with them by donating to their team before the end of this month. If you find yourself without their passion, join with them by supporting them financially. If they can’t raise enough money or pay out of their own pocket, they will not be allowed to walk.

As I’ve said, they are good friends of ours and their team consists of mother, daughters, and niece. We have vacationed with them, been on mission trips with them, and been in small group with them. They come recommended. :p

My wife and I regularly attend Living Water Christian Church, where Laura Guy, wife to my boss Clif Guy. We also give regularly, by check, even after the option became available to use PayPal. Honestly, I had told Clif that we’d be one of the first people to sign up for electronic transactions at Living Water. We haven’t yet, because of the reason Laura mentions in her previous comment.

My lifestyle, since I can remember having to pay bills, is to use electronic transfers. I haven’t paid a utility bill by check since about 1998, excluding the one or two months between moving and signing up for electronic transfer once again. The main reason is that I’m horrible at remembering to pay bills! Send me the statement or invoice, and I’ll make sure it is free from mistakes before you hit my account with an EFT, but don’t expect me to remember to send you a check at the right time. I want to pay it on time every time, and I feel horrible when I’m late to pay, but I’ll miss it many times per year.

The other part of my lifestyle, strangely enough, is that I’ll always pick the cheaper option. I refuse to pay $5-15 to electronically submit my income tax, when I can print everything out and mail it in for cost of First Class mail, currently 42-59 cents. (As a side rant, leave it to government to make what should be the less expensive option for them, more expensive for us! How about no? Process my paper!) I have a printer; I have envelopes, and when I go to the post office they sell me postage. I only use electronic submission when it’s roughly equivalent to the cheapest option, because only then does convenience begin edging out price.

So after I got the e-mail from Laura stating that PayPal was available, I thought, “Excellent. Lets do that.” Then it hit me. I paused. The reality that it was my money that was about to be trimmed, three to four percent plus a transaction fee going to PayPal, rather than all of it to the church; I suddenly didn’t want to do it. I had always known that fee was there, but when it was my money I thought about it a great deal more. We’re there every weekend we can be, and we have checkbooks, and when we fill out a check and put it in the basket, it fulfills our contribution.

Just this week, I was surprised to learn that Resurrection is stopping remote deposit because after using it for some time they’ve found that sum of labor, time, and frustration of remote deposit is greater than the ease of letting the paper check do its thing. This is mostly due to the inefficiencies and duplicated efforts of the process we are currently locked into, but it examples how electronic solutions are not inherently easier and cheaper.

Now I will openly admit that this is where Laura may trump my position on this. If the cost of business though PayPal is less than the overhead it takes to manually process our check every month - my bad, I’ll sign up today.